The Washington Post The company is introducing a new climate-focused AI chatbot on its homepage, in its apps and within its articles. Called “Climate Answers,” the experimental tool will leverage the company’s extensive coverage to answer questions about climate change, the environment, sustainable energy and more.
Some of the questions you can ask the chatbot include, “Should I install solar panels on my home?” and “Where in the U.S. are sea levels rising the fastest?” Like other AI chatbots we’ve seen, it uses the information it learns to display a summary. In this case, Climate Answers asks: The Washington PostWe’ll answer your questions going back to 2016, from the launch of our climate section.
Image: The Washington Post
“We have a lot of innovative and original reporting,” says Vineet Khosla. The Washington PostThe company’s chief technology officer said in an interview: The Verge“The answer is buried somewhere in the stories we’ve written over the years of data-packed reporting.”
Below each answer, you’ll see a link to the article the chatbot used to generate the answer, along with a related snippet from which it drew its information. The tool is based on OpenAI’s large-scale language model, but The Washington Post We are also experimenting with AI models for Mistral and Meta’s Llama.
Image: The Washington Post
Asked about the possibility of misinformation, Khosla said Climate Answers won’t answer questions that don’t have answers. “Unlike other answer services, we build this into verified journalism,” Khosla said. “If you don’t know the answer, we think it’s better to say, ‘I don’t know,’ than to make up an answer.” But we’ll be trying out the tool today when it launches to get a sense of its guardrails.
The Washington Post This isn’t the only news media outlet using information archives to power AI chatbots. Financial Times Ask FT is a chatbot that subscribers can use to get answers about topics related to the publication’s coverage. Meanwhile, News Corp, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, The Vergeof Parent company Vox Media has entered into a licensing partnership with OpenAI.
The Washington Post The company is gradually increasing its use of AI, and according to Khosla, the media outlet has also introduced an AI-based summary function for some of its articles. The Washington PostWhile ’s new chatbot can only respond to climate-related questions for now, Khosla didn’t rule out the possibility of expanding it to other topics the outlet covers: “We hope that this experiment will expand and scale across all areas. The Washington Post “That’s right,” Khosla said.
